My 5 picks
The second week of Music10 flew by. Sorry not to have posted as things were happening, but rest assured, now that it’s over, I will keep trying to digest everything I experienced in blog format over the next few days.
Most of my time last week was consumed by rehearsing for, performing in, and listening to the three concerts of the student composers’ new works. Over the course of Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday evenings, I listened to my fellow performers premiere over 20 new works written by the student composers expressly for this festival, and I performed myself in 3 works. How can I possibly sum up everything I heard??
Well, eighth blackbird suggested a way to me, by instituting a bit of a competition: at the end of the third concert, each performer and composer got to vote for their 5 favourite pieces; the two pieces with the most votes would be performed again at the final concert on Friday evening – kind of a democaratic encore. So, instead of trying to discuss everything I heard in all three nights, I’ll just tell you a bit about the five pieces that I voted for, in no particular order.
Jenny Olivia Johnson – now is the blue (clarinet, cello, piano, electronics)
This was the only student work to feature electronics, which Jenny herself manipulated. Before the performance, she commented that the work was inspired by a 3am drive in rural Massachusetts, listening to the music of Samuel Barber on the car radio. The electronics evoked the sounds of a night drive – birds, crickets, and other nocturnal murmurs. The influence of Barber’s style on Jenny’s instrumental writing was palpable – not only when she quoted his music directly, but also in her use of lush, beautiful harmonies.
Wenhui Xie, After . . . (clarinet, violin, percussion, piano)
Wenhui’s found the inspiration for her quartet in the collection of short stories by Japanese author Haruki Murakami titled After the Quake. This collection of short stories features characters who lived far from the Kobe earthquake of 1995 but whose lives were altered by the quake nonetheless. Wenhui’s quartet drifted from one gesture to another, alternating between soft tremors and moments of terror. She created an atmosphere of suspense that had me completely engaged throughout her piece.
Paul Kerekes, Hail (flute, cello, piano)
While composing this trio, Paul had in mind the admittedly bizarre image of being in a sculpture garden during a hailstorm. The image behind the piece mattered less in Paul’s trio, however – the truly remarkable thing about his piece was how well it held together on purely musical grounds. At the heart of the work was a pretty basic, quasi-minimalist ostinato, that kept returning. Yet Paul highlighted in his piece the contrasts possible from this small amount of material: the opening section was quite lively, while the second part of the piece presented the same basic material in a much more subdued manner.
Christopher Stark, Stars in Dead Reflection (clarinet, double bass, percussion, piano)
Chris’s piece was the last student work to be performed. Yet after three nights of listening to works by the student composers, this work still managed to grab my attention. I made an impulse decision to add it to my “five”, even though I had already planned out what five pieces I would vote for. He created a beautiful world of sounds that just drew me into his work.
Michael Ippolito, Nocturne (flute, violin, piano)
Michael’s piece is the only one on this list that I performed in. It was a very challenging piece to perform, but the musical payoff was huge. The piece begins with a slow section in which Michael interweaves motives from Chopin’s Nocturne in E flat Major, op. 9, no. 2, with a haunting melody of his own. The diabolically fast middle section climaxes with a return to Michael’s haunting melody, now played fortissimo. The piece ends with quotations from the Chopin Nocturne, now even more remote than they were in the beginning.
And the winners are . . .
One of the pieces I voted for won: Paul Kereke’s Hail. No surprise really, I think everyone found it to be easy to connect with on a first listen.
The other piece that won was Amy Kirsten’s L’ange pale, for soprano, flute, and percussion. Immediately after it was performed, people began speculating that Amy’s extremely theatrical work would win. Her piece set a French poem, but it was by no means a straightforward song with accompaniment. She took the poetry apart syllable by syllable, and made both the singer and the instrumentalists play around with all the possible sounds that each syllable could generate. All of the performers in Amy’s piece really got into this rather unusual text-setting, and gave a very convincing performance.
So what drew me to the pieces that I picked for my top five? The pieces I chose all have a few traits in common. First of all, these were all pieces that managed to keep my attention throughout, and that I could make sense of as I listened to them for the first (and only!) time – so the structure and the dramatic pacing worked pretty well in all of these works. Second, they all featured a lot of very beautiful sonorities – sorry to say it, but at the end of the day I still like to hear a few pleasing, (post)romantic harmonies somewhere along the way. Finally, I gravitated towards pieces that had some interesting contrasts built in – the different sections in Paul and Michael’s pieces, the soft tremors and loud crashes of Wenhui’s – without being contrasting to the point of distraction.
Is this the beginning of some sort of an aesthetic manifesto? I guess, for now, I’ll just keep listening . . .
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